Sunday, December 18, 2005

(this is a combination of a review and some more specific comments on deck-building experiences with Blue Moon)

I had played a couple games of Blue Moon in 2004 when it first cameout, and was unimpressed. The art was pretty, but the theme didn'treally grab me and the gameplay somehow seemed unremarkable. Iessentially dismissed it.

Fast forward to fall of this year; Every couple of years, I get theurge to play a game like Magic: The Gathering, but I've avoided it forseveral reasons, despite certain appeal. The appealing features ofMagic, to me, include lots of permutations for play, a variety ofstrategic approaches, opportunities for clever tactical play, and inparticular, the ability to do deckbuilding. Deckbuilding games areappealing because they allow substantial strategic exploration beforeactually playing. Most German-style games don't allow for a lot ofpre-game strategic planning. But, Magic has some huge flaws from myperspective: blind purchases, an extremely deep money pit, andgameplay I don't find that engaging. Well, in the process ofexploring the desire for this kind of game, I found a lot of peoplesaying very positive things about Blue Moon. Further, a guy I gamewith regularly had recently gotten into it and had very positivethings to say about it, so I gave it another try.

Blue Moon seemed to satisfy all of the requirements. It had manypermutations (8 pre-built pre-balanced decks that were all reported tobe interesting), a range of strategies, tactics and the ability tobuild decks. Further, it has no blind purchases and the "money pit"aspect is limited. Because of the way the rules are constructed, a(retail-priced) purchase of about $100 gets you every card and theability to build every legally constructable deck. So, for $200 (nosmall sum of money, but still, limited) two players can play withabsolutely no limitations. In contrast, most CCGs, $200 will give youa good start, but will only scratch the surface of the possible amountone could spend. Finally, the comments on the net assured me thegameplay was more compelling than it originally seemed.

So, I gave it another try, and I must say I've been extremelyimpressed. The deckbuilding aspect intrigued me the most, but Iplayed quite a few games with the stock decks first. It's impressiveto me how dramtically different each of these pre-built decks are, andyet how well balanced they are against each other. Each has its ownstyle of play, some more similar, and some rather different. But,what I really wanted to try was the deck building.

Deck building

The Emissaries & Inquisitors deck give a variety of interestingdeck-building options with the Inquisitor cards. So, I designed abunch of decks (see them at my Blue Moon DeckDatabase), and recently had the opportunity to play a couple ofgames with these constructed decks. I remain extremely pleased andentertained. The first game we played was using decks we each thoughtwere reasonably strong. My deck was a Mimix-based deck that had ahuge number of free cards. This meant I could very quickly play agreat many cards. My opponent's deck was a Flit deck aimed atblocking strong cards and using direct dragon attraction cards to adda little offensive power. The game was quite close with my deckhammering hard on the offensive, while the Flit managed to keepblocking most of those attacks. In the end, the Mimix won, thoughonly barely.

The second deck-building match we each played a deck we didn't thinkwe necassarily be particularly strong. I played an Aqua deck builtwith the goal of being able to outlast an opponent in nearly anyfight. Through a combination of high valued cards and a large numberof shield cards (mutants and non-mutants), it would be a rarecircumstance where this deck would truly be forced to retreat andcombined with the Aqua's "Water of Immortality", there's no particularreason to avoid burning through cards. My opponent's deck was a Khind"one-trick" deck, but it was a powerful trick. The trick was tocollect a hand containing the right set of cards and be able to playthem all at once: both floods (forcing your opponent to retreat,immediately) along with an number of cards which increase the numberof dragons attraced if the opponent retreats. The result was a veryunusual, but interesting game.

The entire game lasted only three fights. The first fight involved ahuge number of cards on both sides. At least 10 cards for each of us,if not more. In the end, the Khind were forced to retreat, butunbeknownst to me he had accumulated most of the cards into his handrequired for his "trick". A few cards into the second fight, myopponent made an error that would rapidly lead to me winning. In theinterest of seeing how it would turn out without that error, Isuggested we back out the move. Having backed out this last play, hemanaged to quickly get the full complement of required cards in hisand and triggered the trick. Two floods meant I was forced to retreatand had to concede four dragons, moving it from two on my side to twoon his. By this point, my opponent was using his Inquisitor RazorMind's ability to discard cards at every opportunity. My deckremained strong, but before I could get to 6 on my side, he was ableto retreat, ceding me a single dragon, and then discard the remaining2 or 3 cards in his hand for the win. Overall, a very interestinggame.

So far, I remain very interested in this game. The deckbuildingaffords a number of opportunities for strategy and analysis outside ofthe context of an individual game. The gameplay itself is more funthan I originally recognized, and experience with the decks certainlyhelps. Further, the basic mechanic (a brinkmanship mechanic, notunlike Taj Mahal) works far better in a two player game than it doesin multi-player game. Overall, a very enjoyable game experience, anddefinitely it is the first I have found that truly successfullyscratches that "game like Magic" itch. Rating: A+

Friday, December 9, 2005

For a while now, I've had a few Google AdSense ads on my site, as anexperiment. I think the program is a great idea, and it's easy to useand in general fairly unobtrusive. The ads that get selected arefrequently comically mismatched to the content due to homonyms or thelike, though. In any case, I figured if I could generate some revenue off ofthis website, that'd be a nice fringe benefit.

When it comes down to it, it's not very much money. If it worked outto, say, $100/year, that might feel like it's worth it. It's not verymuch money, but I could buy a few games with it and it would be a niceperk. In reality, it's not even that much, and for such a smallamount, I'd get more satisfaction from providing the content hereunsullied by the clutter of advertising (even as unobtrusive as GoogleAdSense is). So, unless something changes, I'll probably continue theexperiment til the end of the year and then remove all the ads.

On a related note, I've officially put the Creative Commons licensefor this blog on the web page. I used the "Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License". In the majority of cases, ifyou want to commercially use any of my content (text, images, sourcecode) that is not explicitly otherwise licensed, I am happy to grant aroyalty-free license for such, but I do require that I be contactedfirst.

In the end, I don't put stuff here in the hopes of making a buck, I doit because I think it makes the web a better place and it gives me anoutlet for the occasional self-indulgent rambling. I really enjoyhearing stories from people about how their 12-year-old loves theHeroscape Combat Simulator, or that my discussion of Baby Signsconvinced their spouse to give it a try. So, let me know if youlike/appreciate/use the stuff I put here.

Update (12/9): Several people commented that part of the issueis that there are no ads in the RSS. This is true, but I'm notconvinced it would make a big difference anyway, for two reasons: 1) Alot of evidence suggests "regulars" of sites don't click on ads. Ifyou've subscribed to the RSS feed, you're a "regular". 2) I get a lotof random visitor traffic, mostly through google, and this is a fargreater number of visitors than the "regulars". I estimate somewherearound 100 regular RSS-based readers of this blog. In contrast, theweb version of the blog and the Heroscape related stuff I've built inparticular (which have AdSense on them) have somewhere in the ballparkof 1000 unique new visitors per week, excluding search engines, otherrobots, etc.

I may actually try to break down the ad revenue page-by-page and leavethem on some pages if one or two pages represent the bulk of therevenue, I may leave it. Further, I may leave the highest revenuepages in place long enough to get over the threshold at which they'llsend me a check. In any case, I find ads in RSS much more annoyingthan most ads, so I don't foresee myself ever putting those in thisblog/feed.

On additional note for those who read via RSS: If you're interested inreading the comments on current "front page" entries in RSS as well asthe entries themselves, there is an RSS feed that includes them athttp://mkgray.com:8000/blog/index.crss. Enjoy.

Friday, November 11, 2005

Thursday, November 10, 2005

I've been playing Blue Moon a bunch recently. It's very interesting.I had played it a couple times and been pretty unimpressed, but recentcomments online and in person made me give it a second look and I'mglad I did. Just a few weeks ago, the final two expansion decks werereleased. This means some of the more advanced deckbuildingcapabilities are fully possible. Personally, I find the idea of adeckbuilding game quite appealing, but the blind purchase aspect ofCCGs has been such a negative feature to me that I've avoided them.Blue Moon has some very CCG like qualities, with two bigqualifications: There are no blind purchases and the money pit is muchshallower -- you can own every deck and given that the rules prohibitduplicate cards in a deck, construct every conceivable deck for $105,if you pay full retail cost.

So, I decided it would be nice to have a tool to help build decks andmore importantly, a place to share these constructed decks online.So, I built the Blue Moon Deck DB, a web based tool to help design and share decks. It's Firefox only and is a little rough around the edges. I'm hoping to add more features soon, but I'm interested in feedback and once I'm comfortable with its stability, I'll post it to the wider audience at BGG and perhaps elsewhere.

Sunday, November 6, 2005

I got to play several more Essen 2005 games this weekend and replay acouple I played earlier. I finally did play Caylus. All of the belowcomments are based on only a play or two, but you may notice arecurring theme: "I don't need to buy it." Oh well. The best gameexperience of the weekend was Lord of the Rings. We played with all the expansions, including the dark tiles.I was Sauron managed to get the Dark Rider back to Mordor justas Sam was about to drop the ring into Mount Doom. I had just barely failed to nail them in Bree, then again in Isengard and again in Shelob's Lair. A very satisfying game for all involved. Normally, for me, novelty goes a long way, so to have a 5-year-old game (admittedly, one of my favorites) be the best gaming experience of the weekend says something. I'm usually sufficiently big into "what's new" that that excitement exceeds a good experience at my favored games. Not so this time. Caylus and Antike came close though, but were not quite there.

Caylus

It's outstanding, but it's not quite as earth shaking as many have made itout to be. It's long, and it can have some downtime, which is not a good combination. It seems that usually it will be quite engaging with little downtime, but the length detracts. Above and beyond that, there's a nicely interlocking set of mechanisms, but nothing amazingly clever or revolutionary. It's a very well done resource management game with some novelty in the mechanisms. A definite buy, but it's not Puerto Rico. Even with experienced players, it's going to take 100-150 minutes, maybe more.

Big Kini

Good exploration game, but when it comes down to it, another player summed it up: "more of the same". It's got nice mechanisms, bits, and all that, though it lacks a feeling of tension.

Beowulf

Oh, I so wanted to like this. After the first play, I was luke warm. One third of the way into the second play, I was hopeful, it looked like there might be some interesting and deeper hand management decisions than it originally seemed. Then, luck happened. I like luck in games. A lot. But, Beowulf has luck in the same (and only) place it has strategy and tactics: hand management. In addition to the luck of the draw, which is reasonably small and the usual factor in hand management games, it has the so called "risks", particularly during "major episodes" which are basically a magnified "luck of the draw". A good draw in a mid-episode risk is very beneficial. A bad draw in a mid-episode risk is very bad. If the luck were instead somewhere else, say in the selection of the order of the episodes, or in some other aspect of the game, it might not ruin it, but I think the potential variability of the swings of luck that so fundamentally and directly affect the core of the game eliminates too much of the impact of earlier decisions. At least I know I don't need another big box filling up shelf space.

Fettnapf

Enh. Cute mechanic and nice integration of cardplay and memory, but in the end I'm not sure I believe your decisions (what card to play) really makes much of a difference.

Shear Panic

The Aardman-esque sheep are really cute, but when it comes down to it, it's an abstract puzzle game and really not that interesting of one. Plus, it seems to have some kingmaker issues which is even more annoying in a puzzle game.

Poison

This was good. Not amazing, not revolutionary, but quick, a nice refinement of the Too Many Cooks mechanic and fun. It's a shame it's so overproduced. If Amigo (or someone else) comes out with a version in the small "standard" card box size, I'll definitely pick it up. Otherwise, I'll hold on to that shelf space and play someone else's copy.

Sag's mit Symbolen

We played this, thinking it would be a nice light not-quite-party-game. Oops. It's an odd little pseudo-deduction/clue-giving game. It's actually got some rather interesting and difficult decisions. It'd be nice to have it in English, but using a translation sheet wasn't bad.

Cash & Guns

Very cute, simple bluff, counter-bluff, special-powers, awesome-foam-handgun game. Unfortunately, it's outrageously expensive for what it is. Again, as a straight small package card game, I'd probably pick it up. As is, I can pass.

Techno Witches

I commented on this earlier, but my impression remains very positive and if anything, has improved. Fun, fast, clever, interesting.

Mesopotamia

I commented on this earlier as well. A second play neither improved nor degraded my impression. It's quite good, though it feels a little dry in the end.

Antike

The surprise hit of the weekend for me. It's a 2 hour (less with experienced players, I presume) civilization building game which very effectively captures that "Civ Lite" target so many people seem to have been shooting for and missing. At its core is a shockingly simple, but amazingly elegant, clever, and effective action selection mechanism. Basically, you have a "wheel of actions" and after your first turn action, you may choose (and move to) any of the next 3 actions on the wheel as your next action or pay to move to an action further around the wheel. This prevents you from doing the same thing over and over and because of the positioning of the actions on the wheel makes it hard to alternate or otherwise rapidly cycle through complimentary actions. You can do it somewhat, but at a cost, both literal and in opportunity. Further, each action is "small" which means your turn can be played very very fast. At the beginning of the game, 5-10 second turns. By the end of the game, 30 second turns. This means you remain engaged in the game constantly. It manages to do all this while packing in the core elements of a good civilization building game: expansion, building (cities & temples), resources, warfare, and technology.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

I'm as pleased as can be. As I href=http://www.mkgray.com:8000/blog/Personal/Fathergood/Baby-Signs.html>mentioned earlier,we've been doing "Baby Signs" with our daughter. A week or twoago, she learned a new sign: She holds her hand flat, and with theother hand makes a tapping/poking motion on the surface of her hand.It means "board game". Can you see me beaming from here?

She loves playing her board games. Of course, as a 14-month-old,"playing" means examining the bits, moving them around the boardfairly randomly and occasionally scattering them about. So far, weplay a lot of Chutes and Ladders (Sesam Street edition) where shemoves the pieces around the board (not even uniformly occupyingsquares) and spins the spinner in whatever order she deemsappropriate. She has gotten down the notion that you move the piecesa space at a time, even if her sense of "space" is any point roughlyan inch and a half from where it was before.

We also play a lot of Enchanted Forest and the last time we played wasquite a success. I put all the trees face down and asked her,"Where's the wolf?" (The bottoms of the trees have pictures from fairytales) I then picked one up, looked at it and showed her, saying"That's not a wolf, those are 7-league boots?" From then on shepicked up the trees one at a time, and I asked her if it was the wolf,until she found it.

We've also tried Frechdachs (her first Reiner Knizia game) though shedoesn't seem to enjoy that one as much. She takes the bits in and outof the "suitcases", but it doesn't hold her attention as long.

Cathedral has also been fun, though she's more interested inscattering the pieces than putting them on the board, but that mayhave just been a product of her mood.

Finally, Face-it has been a big success. Face-it has plastic piecesthat rest on a lattice grid. The other day, I put out the board,grabbed the bag and took a piece out, placing it on the board. I thenhanded her the bag. She drew a piece out, and put it on the board.We proceeded to take turns, drawing and placing until the board wasfull.

She'll be getting a few more good ones for Christmas.

Okay, so by most people's standards these aren't really "playing agame", but as a father it's pretty exciting, especially that she'llfrequently be playing with a toy and she'll scoot over to me and sign, "Board game?"

(Also, see the href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist.php3?action=view&listid=11039>GeekListversion of this post for links to the games)

Yesterday, I got the chance to play a bunch of Essen 2005 games. Most notably I did not play Caylus, largely because the first game of it took well over 3 hours and I wasn't in the mood for that kind of duration. I'm sure with experience it gets shorter, but I'm a bit averse to games that start at 3.5 hours.Here are my 1 or 2 play quick comments on each, in the order I played them:

Ark

Beautiful artwork, interesting if not especially amazing game, and it's desperately in need of a reference card. Without it, it was common to get confused about the various card placement limitations. I'm also not so sure there's much plan ahead, but it's cute and small.

Sushi Express

Super random, super light, quite fast, not bad.

Techno Witches

Surprisingly engaging pre-programmed measured movement race game. The components are nice and the mechanics are clever. My only wish is they had components for more than 4 players. It cries out for a Harry Potter brand licensing.

Rotundo

Odd Adlung game about collecing spherical objects. Not awful, but nothing too inspired and definitely an odd theme. I bet if you translated it to English and named it "Balls!", you'd get sales on the name alone. Gameplay has an interesting bit or two but ends up feeling mundane.

Elementals

Simple slap-jack style speed recognition games with attractively illustrated little elemental men. If you like that sort of thing, it's pretty good.

Elasund

Much better than Candamir. It doesn't feel that innovative, but it is a well crafted combination of familiar mechanics along with a few clever bits. If you like Catan-style development games, this is definitely worth a try.

Havoc

Disappointing. Very luck of the draw/draft driven and even when I felt I had control I didn't enjoy it much. It has some serious similarities to Taj Mahal, but I think I'd rather play that anyday. It might be better with fewer (we played with 6).

Mesopotamia

Nice exploration/development/pick-up-and-deliver game. The actions cards are a bit more variable in power level than I'd like ideally (ie, some are very good, some are quite poor) but it's still nice. The exploration element here is very light, but I like it. Plays reasonably quickly too.

King Solomon's Mine

Very cool, but in the end I didn't actually like it that much. Very nice components, though the levels of the stacks are often a bit difficult to read, which is crucial to gameplay. There's also a fair amount of downtime with minimal if any ability to plan ahead. I feel like something's there, but I'm not quite sure.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

People, including me, come up with all sorts of measures forenumerating and ranking the "best" games. I personally am a big fanof Joe Huber's "Happiness" metric, but find it not quite complete.Briefly, the Huber Happiness of a game is: (rating-baseline)*(gamelength * number of plays) where the rating and baseline are on a 0-10scale (baseline of 4.5 is recommended) and game length is in minutes.It's a good metric, especially for "best games of all time" and thatkind of thing. However, it misses two qualities I often want included in such a ranking: novelty and "replayability".

Actually, it partially encompasses replayability, in that it includesnumber of plays, but this can be canceled out by game length. Thatis, 9 plays of a 20 minute game (total, 3 hours) seems likely astronger indicator of replayability than 1 play of a 3 hour game or 2plays of a 90 minute game. So, times played needs to get some moreweight. Of course, "novelty" only applies when looking at a timewindow. When you're talking about "all time" there's no such thing.But, when making something like a "game of the year" or "hot gamesthis month" list, older games should at least be penalized somewhat.

To this end, I've got a "hot games" metric I've been using for a fewyears which I find does a great job of matching my subjectiveperception. Having an objective measure of my subjective perceptionhas an advantage because I can look at my games lot and say "what wasthe hot game for me in fall of 2003?" or the like without having tohave recorded it then.

where X is the final score. The "S" term gives a substantial (but notoverwhelming) bonus for novelty and the sqrt(P) term gives a bonus forreplayability.

What this yields is that my current hot game (looking over the past year) is Fiese Freunde Fette Feten. A year ago today, it was San Juan. A year before that, Electronic Catchphrase. A year before that, Puerto Rico. At some later point, I'll have to generate my (retroactive to 2000) "Matthew's Game of the Year" list or perhaps even "Hot Game of the Quarter".

Thursday, October 13, 2005

I don't tend to play a lot of long games. I play a lot of games thattake an hour or less. I play several that take an hour to two hours.I occasionaly play a two to three hour game. I play games longer thanthree hours very infrequently.

Despite this trend, I've played 3 games recently that exceeded this limit though.

First, over the summer I got to play American Megafauna multi-playerfor the first time. American Megafauna is a brilliantly detailed evolution simulation game. I'd played it with the solitaire rules before andfound it very interesting, but I don't tend to like solitaire, so Ihoped this would yield an even more interesting multi-player game. Iwas wrong. It's not awful, but the randomness that is interesting andchallenging in solitaire is dominating and annoying in themulti-player game. If I recall correctly, this clocked in at justover three hours, but it's not likely to be something I'll repeatmulti-player any time soon. Maybe I'll pull it out solitaire somedaywhen I feel like a good evolutionary romp.

Most recently, I played Twilight Imperium, 3rd edition. This wasgood, but wow was it long. Including rules explanation, all fourplayers having never played before, and a dinner break, it took oversix hours, and we only played to 8 VP. There's a lot going on here,and I expect to play it again, but it's a shame it is so demanding.Certainly, with experienced players it would go much more quickly, butthe time required to get experienced would be substantial.

Finally, in late summer, I played href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/12350>Battlestations. Thisis almost an RPG rather than a board game, but it's close enough.It's a game of tactical space combat and boarding action. This was ablast. Absolutely wonderful, with few qualifications. We played onefairly elaborate scenario and it took about 5 hours, maybe a bit moreincluding rules. But, compared to a traditional RPG, this timeincluded teaching the rules, creating characters, playing the entire"adventure" and wrap-up. It's been a while since I played a real RPG,but a five hour session was never enough. Battlestations manages toreally successfully capture the feel of high-action space operascience fiction. The rules are straightforward, if large. We playedwhere I acted as a GM, but you could clearly play in a moretraditional player-vs-player mode and have it work well. I reallylook forward to trying this one again.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

My original Obscure-Hobbies post got some good replies and I've thought of a few new ones:

Geocaching - I can't believe I forgot this one. It's gaining in popularity, but for now it's sufficiently obscure.

LEGO building - This is sort of borderline. I guess most people don't realize there are adults who have this as a serious hobby, so that qualifies it as obscure.

Underwater Hockey - This is a great one. I'd never heard of it or even imagined it. Rather neat.

Power Kites - Jeph Stahl mentioned this. I actually had the opportunity to try this out, years ago, in grad school, and it had quite an impact, literally. These are kites that are shaped like airfoils which mean they produce a huge amount of lift. My one experience with this, it dragged me across the beach and actually knocked me out. It also caused temporary amnesia of the preceding 6 hours. The kites are pretty cool, and for that matter, temporary memory loss is a sort of cool, if a bit disturbing experience to have. Once.

Chess Boxing - I saw a link to this, which was the actual inspirating for me posting this additional list. I like the idea of alternating rounds of boxing and chess, but it's a slight shame there is no interaction in the two events, other than the fact that I assume it's harder to concentrate on chess after being hit in the head repeatedly.

Contradancing - Again, I'm not quite sure if this qualifies. There are a wide range of forms of obscure dance. Most people are aware of square dancing or folk dancing in general, but Contradancing (while very similar to square dancing) seems to qualify to me. Plus, I have many fond memories of contradancing in the late 80s.

So, the total list is now up to 11: German Board Games, Disc Golf, Fly Ball, Change Ringing, Puzzle hunting, Geocaching, LEGO building, Underwater Hockey, Power Kites, Chess Boxing and Contradancing. What else?

Wednesday, October 5, 2005

href=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809234300/002-4885483-3394439?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance>BabySigns is a very cool idea. I had heard about it before mydaughter was born, and we decided to give it a try when she got theappropriate age. The basic idea is that many babies reach a point where they have the cognitive capacity for language, but lack the vocal control necassary for spoken language. They do, however, have sufficient motor control to make some sophisticated hand gestures.

I was optimistic, but a bit skeptical about the whole notion. Myprimary rationale for being skeptical was that if this really works sowell (allegedly helping prevent tantrums because of improvedcommunication, increasing early communication with the child, etc.)why isn't everybody doing it. But, we decided to give it a try.

We probably started signing to her around 6 months, and she seemedpretty oblivious to it. Then, almost exactly on her first birthday,she figured her first one out. In the two months since then, hersigning vocabulary has exploded. She has a bunch of spoken words too,but her signs tend to be much clearer. Sometimes it's not clear ifshe's saying "bye-bye" or "buh" (book) twice. When she signs, thedifference between flower (sniffing dramatically), apple (fist tocheek, with motion), banana ("peeling" your finger), eat (fingers tomouth), and others is quite apparent.

The fact that she can scoot over to us and sign for "eat" when she'shungry or tell us at snack time what she wants specifically isamazing. Without the signs, I'm sure she'd eventually figure out aword or we'd figure out what she wants just by her general agitation,but this short circuits all that nicely. Currently, she probably ispicking up a new sign less than a day after we start using it.

Monday, September 12, 2005

I've always found obscure hobbies interesting. I like the notion thatwe live in a sufficiently large and rich world that there can be agreat many hobbies people participate in that can each have asubstantial following, but that the vast majority of people arecompletely unaware. For some time, I've been meaning to catalog alist of interesting "obscure hobbies", and this seems as good a placeas any to do it.

I'd be very interested in hearing from other people about items to potentially add to the list. Here's the definition I'm using for obscure hobby:

It must have a substantial following. At least hundreds, but ideally thousands of people worldwide.

It must be an "open" hobby, that anyone who decided to become involved in, could.

It must be something the majority of people have not heard of and don't know exists.

It must involve doing something other than collecting. While I'm sure there are lots of obscure things people collect, this doesn't quite count.

It must not simply be "competetive X" where X is a well known activity that is not usually done competetively.

Of course, there's a lot of borderline cases and I'll probably be inconsistent in my inclusion or exclusion of particular things, but I'm ok with that.

Some examples of things that don't quite make the cut for "obscure"(but are still interesting): Scrapbooking, Curling, Model Railroading,Competetive Scrabble, Wheel Throwing (pottery), LARPing, Knitting and Linux Development.

Over the past few years though I've identified several that do makethe list. I'll try and write more detailed entries regarding some ofthese at some point.

German Board Games

This almost doesn't count, but I am including it. People are aware of board games, but people are largely unaware of the entire genre of adult strategy games, "designer games" or whatever you want to call them. They are substantially less obscure now than they were 10 years ago, but still they're pretty obscure.

Disc Golf

If you haven't heard of this, it's a game with rules essentially like golf, but played with specialized frisbees where the "holes" are in fact metal baskets. It is played more casually than competetively, and the discs aren't quite the same as frisbees. This one is also rising out of obscurity, but it counts.

Fly Ball

A team sport for dogs which is essentially a relay race with hurdles and tennis balls.

Change ringing

You know those huge arrays of bells in churches, particularly in England and New England? The process of ringing them in subtly controlled sequences by adjusting the way people pull on the ropes attached to the bells to produce precisely scheduled peals is called change ringing.

Puzzle hunting

This one almost doesn't count since there is a fairly high degree of awareness of these. These are "hunts" not unlike a scavenger hunt which are solved by finding solutions to many puzzles with interlocking answers, often producing additional layers of puzzles. The MIT Mystery Hunt was my introduction to this kind of activity, but many others exist.

Monday, September 5, 2005

Several years ago, Joe Huber proposed a "happiness metric" for gameswhich I think works very well. The happiness score of a game is

H = (R-O)*(N*T)

where H is the happiness score, R is therating, O is an offset (4.5), N is the number of times you've playedit and T is the average playing time in minutes.

Having been compiling this kind of data for some time, I decided tosee what authors produced the most "happiness". The results aren'ttoo surprising, but they're still interesting. In particular, whileit's no surprise that Reiner Knizia comes out on top, I'm stillimpressed that he outperforms the next highest author by a factor ofover 4. Further, it's nice to see that most of the authors make on thelist by virtue of several games rather than a single dominant game.

Each author is listed along with the number of happiness pointsand the games which are the biggest individual contributors to thescore:

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

I'm very proud of my little girl for being such a wonderful child, butevery now and then she does something that just really really causesme to feel extra proud. I realized those things actually tend to fallin the categories I write about here the most: Technology, Restaurantsand Games. Keep in mind, she's a one-year-old. These things that Iam so proud of may not sound so impressive, but for someone who can'twalk, talk or understand most of what you say, they're pretty cool.

First, the technology category. A couple of months ago, I was usingour TiVo to play music (using the "home media option"). My daughterisn't allowed to watch TV yet, so any use of the television, even justto play music, is very exciting. She eagerly wanted to play with theremote, and the TiVo remote is a pretty robust device, so Iacquiesced. I gave it to her and she proceeded to press buttons, andwith very little help, figured out that the big yellow button pausesand unpauses the music. She sat pausing and unpausing the music forquite some time, rather satisfied with herself. There's somethingvery pleasing as a father to see a child barely 11 months old figureout a piece of "grown-up" technology so quickly and adeptly.

Second, the restaurant category. She eats out very well. She isusually quite well behaved and enjoys the different environments. Onerestaurant we've taken her to several times is a favorite of ours,MaryChung's. At our most recent visit, she rather insistentlywanted to have some of what we were having. While Dun Dun Noodlesseemed perhaps a bit too spicy for a one-year-old, we decided to haveher try some pan fried Peking Ravioli and Mongolian Beef. She lovedthem. She ate a couple of ravs all by herself. When I was in college,we went out to Mary's a lot, often in large groups. We alwaysordered ravs. When preparing our order each person wouldhold up a finger if they wanted an order of ravs (6) for themself orhold up their finger, crooked, if they wanted a half-order (3) forthemself. It made counting the total number of rav orders to placeeasy. It fills me with great pride that my daughter, still unable tosay much, is just about ready to participate in such a protocol. Ijust have to teach her to hold her finger crooked when I say "Ravs?"

Finally, the games category. I don't want to inflict my hobbies on mychildren, but at the same time, I'd be extremely pleased to be able toshare them with them. Further, I don't expect her to be able to playgames for quite some time. She is, after all, only one. But, beingwho I am, I can't help but get games for her, in anticipation thatsomeday she will hopefully want to play them. Well, that day came alot sooner than I expected. We have for her several games, including"Chutes and Ladders" and "Enchanted Forest". The other day, she wasplaying and started reaching urgently toward the games shelf. I tookout Chutes and Ladders and I set it up. My little girl proceeded tograb one of the pawns and tap it repeatedly on the board, in a line,in much the way someone would who was counting out their moves with apawn on the board. She must have seen us do this, or it must be inthe genes, but I hadn't modeled the behavior for her immediatelybefore. On later occasions we "played" Enchanted Forest, dealing thecards back and forth to one another. On another occasion, I got outChutes and Ladders, and just set the box next to her. She proceededto open the box, take out the board and pieces and spinner and playwith them. Wow. I must say, while moving Chutes and Ladders pawnsaround randomly or dealing cards back and forth may not be "Euphrat &Tigris", it really drives home the point: Games are often much moreabout who you play them with.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

At the recommendation of a colleague, I recently read a couple ofnovels by China Mieville. Specifically, Perdido Street Stationand The Scar, and then, just like every else in the world, Iread the new Harry Potter.

The China Mieville novels are highly recommended. He imagines a richand compelling world and unlike some other fiction that focusesheavily on the mileu, he manages to execute good stories in thiselaborate world. I liked them both, but found Perdido StreetStation more satisfying.

J.K. Rowling remains a good writer who writes engaging characters andenjoyable stories, but this latest book was a bit of a disappointment.It wasn't bad, but I think it's probably my least favorite of the Harry Potter series so far.I'll comment below in more detail.

(The following paragraphs contain some spoilers for The DaVinciCode, Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer, The Half-BloodPrince, and the film and book Return of the King.)

While talking to the above-mentioned colleague, I realized a qualityof many books and movies that I find increasingly unpleasant; I don'tlike it when a narrative, especially one which supposedly tells astory of momentous events, ends with the world the same as it started.Recent offenders include notably The DaVinci Code and theReturn of the King. The DaVinci Code I didn't like fora variety of reasons, and the fact that the state of the world isessentially reset by the end of the book just enhances my irritationat it. In the LOTR movie though, it was one of the onlydisappointments. At many levels, I actually feel the movies exceededthe books. But, the elimination of the scouring of the Shire, however"hollywood", felt like the only major disappointment to me. In thebooks, the world was saved, but the world was changed, pervasively.In the movie, not as much. Oh well. In contrast, other novels Ienjoyed a great deal such as two of my favorites by Niven,Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer end in a very differentplaces than they started.

In a book or movie, particularly science fiction and epic fantasy, theworld can change, and you don't have to worry about the "nextepisode". In a TV show, the "reset" effect is often a necassarypremise given the episodic nature of the medium. Some TV shows inrecent years have done an especially good job of moving the storyforward while at the same time, providing enough of a weekly "reset"that you can get away with missing episodes, but are additionallyrewarded for following the story in detail. In books or movies this resetis unnecassary and disappointing.

The Half-Blood Prince doesn't fall victim to this, fortunately,but the book is a bit heavy on the exposition. It felt like verylittle happened and when it finally did, it was a little uncomfortablyrushed. Further, what plot there was felt even more contrived than itoften is. Plus, as many others have mentioned, the book read likepart one of two, while most of the previous books have stood alone farbetter.

Ugh, what a pain. I had a disk fail, again. This time, there was data loss. I think I've managed to restore most everything from backups and web caches for the stuff that wasn't backed up recently, but I probably missed some stuff. If you notice anything, please let me know.

I am aware that the sparkline graphs on theSdJ-Virtual-Market-Results don't work, and I'll try to fix them,but I may not get to it.

Tuesday, August 2, 2005

In similar motivation to my otherrecent boardgamegeek features, I finally got around to addingstatistically correlated game recommendations. For example, if youlook at the page for href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/12>Ra, you can see in the"Related Statistics" block it recommends Traumfabrik. Further, if youclick on the little "i" there, you href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/correlated.php3?gameid=12>cansee that it has a number of weaker suggestions including "LouisXIV", "Samurai" and "Geschenkt". I posted some details href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekforum.php3?action=viewthread&threadid=73248>ina thread on the geek.

Additionally, I've become intrigued by the complex but powerful"matematical" or "no-risk" trade lists that have appeared on the geek.They are much more complex to moderate than the "ultimate" tradelists, but not really any harder to participate. However, they seemto have a much higher success rate; the lists result in successfultrades at a much higher rate. In an effort to simplify theadministration of such a list I created a href=http://mkgray.com:8000/cgi/norisktrade>Mathematical/No-risk TradeResolution Tool. The href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist.php3?action=view&listid=9416>firstlist to use this is active on the geek currently, though it closesfor new submissions tonight. It's very amusing and pleasing to me tosee this kind of quite complex, but effective construct actually used..

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Ever since I was very young, the idea of self-publishing was veryappealing. I recall thinking at around age 11 that everyone should beable to publish "book(s)" even if the potential audience size for itwas very small. I was frustrated at the large and (at the time)mysterious barriers in the way of someone publishing something. Sincethen, the web has partially filled that niche. Anyone can publishcontent to the entire world at very low cost and independent of thesize of the audience for that content. It's still not a book, though.

About two years ago, I researched various self-publishing options.Several were around, and while the barrier to entry was dramaticallylower than traditional publishing, they were still a bit prohibitive.Set-up fees in the ballpark of $500 were typical. If you have a bookthat has an audience of a few hundred, this makes a lot of sense, butif the audience is tens or fewer, that setup fee dwarfs the marginalcost of the individual books. I gave up on the idea.

Earlier this year, I decided to give it another look and discovered href=http://www.lulu.com/>lulu.com. They were offering exactlywhat I had always imagined: Zero up-front cost on-demand production ofbooks from a user-supplied PDF file with a real book binding ata reasonable price, even for color printing. So, I decided to createa test book. I created a 40 page photo book of a recent vacation andhad Lulu print it. The result is remarkable, with a couple notable qualifications.

I got a 41-page full color 8.5"x11" photo book with a real ("perfectbind") book binding printed for under $16 including shipping. Thequality of the printing is outstanding. The paper is heavyweight, thebinding is professional and the photo quality is extremely high. Thephotos are almost photographic print quality. In that regard, I'm extremely satisfied.

The qualifications, however, are several, but none overwhelming.First, the book contained very little text, but much of it is simplymissing in the printed copy. In particular, the text that were intheir own seperate text boxes (I used iWork Pages for the layout)didn't appear at all. Text that was simply on the page in the usualway appeared fine. This is relatively avoidable in the future, but itmakes me somewhat nervous about what else might simply not appear.The other qualifications are more in the vein of RTFM: Luluwarns you that you should embed your fonts or use a standard font. Ididn't do either and while the text came out mostly fine a couple ofpunctuation marks ended up a bit odd and the letters "fi" togetherbecame a hyphen. I'll listen next time. Finally, for the covers,they have very high resolution requirements. The picture I wanted touse wasn't that high resolution, so I simply upsampled it. Theresulting cover actually looks fine, but it isn't quite as sharp as itclearly could be.

Overall, highly recommended. I expect to do at least one more(larger) project with them and will comment here on that experience.

Thursday, July 7, 2005

Last year, I saw a very cool hack called "TiddlyWiki" which was astandalone javascript wiki of sorts. It was a very cool hack, but wasmissing a number of things that would be necessary to make it trulyuseful. I assumed it retained it's status as "just a cool hack".Little did I know.

Last week, for some reason I found myself thinking about TiddlyWiki,and ended up looking it up. The author, Jeremy Ruston, had continueddevelopment and turned it into a rather impressive little application.It was missing a few features I would like, but I figured I couldmodify it to do those things. In the process of looking around at theTiddlyWiki site, I discovered that Steve Rumsby had created his ownadaptation of TiddlyWiki which he dubbed "YATWA" which implementedmost of the features I was looking for.

So, I finished it off, implementing a few more features I wanted and Ipresent the Gray TiddlyWiki. TheGray TiddlyWiki has links to Steve's and Jeremy's sites as well asother relevant stuff. Check out the main href=http://www.tiddlywiki.com/>TiddlyWiki site for basicinformation. If you're using greasemonkey, you may want to disableit, or at least disable the "linkify" script because it causesTiddlyWiki's to break.

Game Winners

All of these, except Robert Smith, accomplished this in large part byowning a great deal of Niagara. Robert Smith had the bulk of hiswinnings in cash. George Heintzelman also gets an honorable mention for ending with over $18,000 in cash.

The game had a total of 134 active traders. Alex, the winner, was the second most active trader.

Friday, June 24, 2005

The Del.icio.us sortscript I wrote in January recently broke due to somesubstantial changes in the format at del.icio.us. I fixed it, so itworks again and fixed the annoying bug about items with only a singlebookmarker. Simply reinstall the script to replace the old (nowbroken) one.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

I first heard about (and heard) href="http://www.eskimolabs.com/hp/">"Harry and the Potters" lastyear, and was pleased to see that they'd be performing in Bostontoday. Conveniently enough, it was at the Boston Public Library,which is across the street from my office. The band is a couple ofbrothers who bear a bit of a resemblance to Harry Potter and theyperform a bunch of original Harry Potter themed songs. Prototypicallyrics include "Blood may be pure but your heart is spoiled, youwouldn't be tough without Crabbe and Goyle" and "We've got to saveGinny Weasly from the Basilisk/We've got to save the school from thatunseen horror."

Their singing could be substantially improved. Their lyrics often tryto rhyme but don't quite make it, and their meter is frequentlyflawed. Their lyrics are clever but often quite repetetive.Yet, they're extremely entertaining and oddly captivating. I'mtempted to call their amateurish sound somehow "refreshing" but thatwould be stretching it.

Seeing them live helped me figure out part of it. They're simplycharming. The crowd was a mix of about half adolescents and halfadults ranging from college students to some couples in their sixties.The performance was imperfect but good, sincere and engaging. Ibought a CD which notes inside, "Recorded at home during April andMay, 2003". Like I said, charming.

If you do take alisten, try "Saving Ginny Weasly". It's their best one.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

(Executive summary: I wrote some new features for BoardGameGeek thataids in getting board game recommendations, not unlike the now defunct BGRSthat used to be on this site. See the last paragraphs for links.Read on for my ramblings.)

I've been an adminat boardgamegeek for a few years now, and have been very happy tohelp contribute to a site that has been immensely valuable to theboard gaming community. I wrote some features in the past like thenotification of new content, but that's been largely obsoleted by theavailability of per game RSS feeds. Scott and Derk have built a trulyimpressive system.

Unrelated to the 'geek, I wrote the Board Game Recommendation Service,a now defunct system using so-called collaborative filtering torecommend board games based on other people who have similarpreferences to you. The dirty secret of the BGRS (and many many other"collaborative filtering" systems) is that its performance is onlymarginally better than giving people a list of the top rated itemswith the ones they've already rated removed. The average of otherpeople's rating is a very good predictor of how much you will likesomething. More or less, quality is quality. People want systemslike this to work (and they imagine their preferences are particularand unique) so they seem to, even though the "collaborative" effect issmall. The collaborative system I used for BGRS (and similar systemsin the industry I have seen) did outperform a simple average, but onlyslightly.

Now, on the 'geek, the rank list is very good, but recently it hasstarted being less useful to me personally as a recommendation systembecause of two things: I own most of the games in the top few hundredand there are an increasing number of wargames which I know not to bemy thing. One way people have been starting to get more refinedratings has been to use the href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekbuddy.php3?action=view">GeekBuddiessystem. This means if I choose a bunch of "GeekBuddies" who havesimilar tastes to me, I can sort out the genres of games that don'tinterest me. Unfortunately, this is a small set of people. So,expanding on the href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekbuddy.php3?action=gameratings">GeekBuddiesGame Ratings page, I added the ability to do several things (eachoptionally) that make it especially useful for finding gamerecommendations:

Calculate ratings from your buddies andtheir buddies. This casts a wider net of ratings while limiting to acircle of at most a few hundred people, rather than the few thousandusers on BGG.

Only show games you don't own. After all, you'vealready bought those.

Only show games you haven't rated. Ifyou've rated them already, you probably don't need other people'sopinions as much.

Only show games on your wishlist. Helps decidewhat to get first.

I may add additional filters in the future like "Exclude Expansions","Exclude Category" "Supports N players", and "Length between X and Y",but it's pretty useful as is. So, check out the href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekbuddy.php3?action=gameratings">improvedGame Ratings page. Additionally, I wrote some code for user RSSfeeds (eg, href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekrss.php?geek=mkgray>my rssfeed) and the href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geekbuddy.php3?action=recent">GeekBuddies'recent posts page. Thanks very much to Scott for letting me addthese features. I welcome any additional comments, feeback orsuggestions. (btw, these are some of the features I mentioned earlier for those of you keeping track)

Monday, May 30, 2005

A while ago, I posted the idea of a month metric for gauging quality/longevity and overall "goodness" of a game. Essentially, count the number of unique months in which a game is played. That is it's score. Read the old entry for some more discussion of it.

I figured I'd post an update of games with a high month metric. I'veonly been keeping accurate numbers since 1999, so the theoreticalmaximum score is in the sixties.

Electronic Catchphrase is the only with a score above 30 at 32, and I expect itwill continue to go up though more slowly than it did in recent years.Five games get scores above 20: Crokinole (25), Can't Stop (23), 6nimmt! (23), Call my Bluff (23) and Battle Line (21).

Another five games score 15 or above: Zirkus Flohcati (16), Speed(16), Lost Cities (15), TransAmerica (15), and RoboRally (15). Thislist rapidly betrays my taste for fairly short but not overly lightgames. RoboRally is the only one on the list (with the occasionalexception of Crokinole) that goes over 45 minutes.

Sixteen games have a score of 10 or above and there starts to be anumber of "big" games here: Ra (14), For Sale (14), Apples to Apples(13), Knockabout (13), Carcassonne (13), Hick Hack in Gacklewack (12),Princes of Florence (12), Puerto Rico (12), Ricochet Robot (11),SpinBall (11), Traumfabrik (11), Settlers of Catan (11), Medici (10),Igel Argern (10), Lord of the Rings (10), and Schnaeppchen Jagd (10).The auction games (Ra, Medici, Traumfabrik) and LOTR would all behigher if they were more favored in the groups I frequent.

In the end, I'm pretty happy with the month metric. All 27 games onthe list are "great"s. Some recent games seem likely to make the listwithin another year or two (Ticket to Ride, Oasis, Heroscape, SanJuan, Adam & Eva) but it's too early to be sure and the month metrichas that conservativism nicely built in. The only games that seemlike their "missing" from the list are Vinci (current score: 8) andEuphrat & Tigris (current score: 8) and they'll get there, though itwill take more than two months.

Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Spotlight is great. In a just a few days of use I've already found itextremely useful. But, there's two things that have further improvedit's value: Slogger and "secret" codes and logic.

Slogger is a firefox plugin (href=http://www.kenschutte.com/firefoxext/>available here) whichlets you log the full content of every web page you visit. WithSpotlight, this means every web page you visit is now indexed. Veryuseful for the "I know I just saw this...". Sort of like a betterversion of Google Search History without the nagging privacy issues.Unfortunately, Slogger on OSX has some issues. First, the logdirectory selection doesn't work, so you have to manually set it usingabout:config. Second, they've got a (common) firefox extension bug(not Mac specific) which causes pages loaded in the "background" (eg,background tabs) to not get logged. I fixed this and provided href=http://www.mkgray.com:8000/slogger.diff.txt>a patch to version 0.3's slogger.js filewhich fixes this. They're up to 0.5 now, and my patch won't workdirectly on that version, but the basic idea is the same. I've sentthe info over to Ken Schutte, the maintainer.

Secret logic. Spotlight lacks a sophisticated query grammar, ordoes it? On the href=http://www.apple.com/macosx/tips/spotlight.html>SpotlightTips page they list some useful special keywords like "kind:image"for restricting searches, but some experimentation has turned up a fewothers. We know that a space implies "AND", but it is a "leastprecedence AND". Using most other punctuation ("+ "and "," both work,for example) acts as a "high precedence AND". The "|" (pipe)character is an "OR". Finally, "(-token)" seems to act as anexcluder, which isn't quite a NOT, but close enough. It has to beimmediately after another keyword with no space. The differentprecedence ANDs are nice.

So, "xmas|christmas bob|robert" is ((xmas OR christmas) AND (bob ORrobert)) and "jack+jill|hansel+gretel" is ((jack AND jill) OR (hanselAND gretel)). The exclusion operator doesn't seem to combine withothers except as a final exclusion step, but something like"foo+bar|baz(-quux)" works as "(((foo AND bar) OR baz) AND NOT quux)".As noted on the tips page, putting a phrase in double quotes looks forthat phrase, but it doesn't seem the most consistent; that phraseappearing in text files, for example, will not show up. Finally,prefixing the whole query with a single quote has some effect, butwhat exactly that is isn't obvious: it seems to exclude any imagesearch results and according to macosxhints, it doesn't search deletedtext in Word files, for example. Hopefully, Apple will provide somemore detailed docs on this, but in the mean time, exclusion inparticular is really useful to have.

Sunday, May 1, 2005

It's been about a year since I switched to OSX. I'vebeen very pleased with it, and have been looking forward to a numberof the new features announced for Tiger. So, like a good Mac devotee,I went out to the Mac store on Friday night, along with hundreds ofothers, and picked up a copy of OS X version 10.4, aka Tiger.

Overall, it's very good. The feature I was most looking forward to,Spotlight, delivers on those high expectations. It's fast, it worksand is integrated throughout the OS. The interface is frequentlyawkward, incomplete or inconsistant, but it works so well, and with afew exceptions, it works the way you want to that these flaws areforgivable. Within smart folders (whether in mail or in Finder), youcan create reasonably though not arbitrarily complex queries.However, in the search bar, there is no syntax (whether with parens,"+" and "-" symbols, or something else) for more complex queries.

I've already found Spotlight quite useful, but there have already beenoccasions where I've wanted to do a structured restriction of a query.Switching to a Smart Folder for such a query isn't too bad, but itwould be nice to be able to add it to the tex queries in some waysimilar to the way google has the search qualifiers like "link:" and"site:". The ability to add "comments" to files which will then befound in Spotlight is nice too, though I'm not sure I'll use it a lot.One of the nicest accidental Spotlight surprises was that Adium, avery nice IM client, stores its logs as HTML and these areautomatically indexed. They simply show up as "Documents", ratherthan their own category, which would be nice, but still, very slick.Sadly, Stickies are not indexed, which seems like a dumb oversight.

Dashboard, I wasn't particularly looking forward to. It seemedlike it was a bit more sizzle than steak. It turns out, that's onlypartiallly true and the sizzle is really really nice. It'll take abit more use before I determine if it is actually useful in the longrun, but for now, there are several useful widgets and having veryfast access to them is convenient. Plus, they are pretty.

Automator is a bit of a disappointment, but I didn't have highexpectations. All of the first several "workflows" I wanted to createturned out to be impossible because of either missing actions or thelack of multiple inputs on existing actions. Further, the ones thatare possible are not always straightforward to build. There's alsosome weirdness with other application interactions (see below aboutMail). I'll have to try it a little more to be sure, but my gut saysthat until there's a much wider corpus of "generic" actions, I won'tfind it so useful.

Mail has a few changes, the biggest of which is "SmartMailboxes", which is really a spotlight feature. Smart Mailboxes aregreat. I love being able to filter and slice up my mail and SmartMailboxes dramatically improve this capability. Key to thisusefullness is their speed. Most smart mailboxes come up effectivelyinstantly. A couple of the very large mail boxes (roughly 20,000matching messages each) take a few seconds, but that's clearly relatedto the display of the messages, not the underlying query. Anothersmart mailbox, which relies on the 20,000 message box as a qualifyingcondition, but further narrows the list substantially, loadsinstantly. Mail added some other nice Spotlight features, includingimproved searching within mail and easy quick Spotlight searches ofsenders, names, and the like. The user interface of Mail has alsochanged and I'll agree with the href=http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/3>Ars Technicaevaluation that mail has been "beaten with the ugly stick".

One more Mail weirdness. In all of the smart mailbox filtering, thereis no filter for read versus unread messages. Annoying, butmanageable. However, if you go into Automator, you can create anAutomator workflow which selects unread messages and then you can tellAutomator to display those. They pop up as though they were their ownmailbox, but they really exist only ephemerally. There is no mailbox,even though you have on selected, the message list corresponds tothose selected by your Automator query. A little weird. Overallthough, other than the ugliness, the new mail features are verypowerful and useful.

Preview now allows you to, among other things, annotate PDFfiles. I like this idea a great deal. It remains to be seen if I'lluse it much, but I think I might.

Overall, I like it a lot. The system speed seems better, ifanything and Spotlight remains the star of the show, but it'samazingly well integrated.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

As we are about to enter the season of speculating over who will winthe Spiele des Jahres this year, I thought it would be nice if peoplecould put their (fake) money where their mouth is and participate in avirtual stock market. I've always wanted to implement a virtual stockmarket, and this seemed like a good excuse.

The basic idea is that you buy "shares" in the various games and onlythe eventual SdJ winner pays out in the end ($100 per share). So, goput your prognostication skills to the test in the 2005 Spiele des Jahres Virtual Stock Market Game.I'll post the top few "winners" when the award is given.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

While I was in college, I thought it would be really great if I couldarrange it so my alarm clock would wake me up when I was in a lightsleep rather than when I was in a deep sleep. I tried hooking up amicrophone to the computer near the bed to detect sound (I assumed I'dbe more likely to roll around and the like when in a light sleep) andtrigger based on that. There was too much ambient noise in a collegedorm environment and I gave up on the idea and I haven't had acomputer near my bed to try again since.

When I read about the href="http://www.sleeptracker.com/">Sleeptracker, I was naturallyvery pleased, but at the same time skeptical. Their webiste had thetone of a scam; light on specifics, high on claims. A while later,Gear Live published a href="http://www.gearlive.com/index.php/news/article/sleeptracker_watch_review_03221147/">verypositive review and my interest was again piqued. I decided to order one.

It works. I wouldn't say I bounce out of bed, exicted and happy tostart the day with it. I'm simply not that much of a morning person.However, I've not had that awful "please, not now" headache feeling Ioften get when the alarm goes off. Of course, with a baby, the babyoften beats the alarm, in which case it's less effective.

It works by having an internal accelerometer which detects motion oversome period of time (it seems to require two movements in about aminute, but that might not be quite right) and it considers suchmovement a "light sleep" moment. It then ignores you for 8 minutesand starts waiting for movement again. It's a simple and good system.It doesn't require any reliable skin contact, it isn't sensitive toambient light, noise or even to my detection movement by someone elsein bed.

I wish they'd put such an explanation on their web site that explainsthis rather than mumbo jumbo like: "[it] continuously monitors signalsfrom your body that indicate". Yeah, singals like whether or notyou are moving. It would improve their credibility a lot. They should atleast put something in the manual. The fact that it uses anaccelerometer was apparent after playing with it for an hour or two.The managing partner in the company stated it explicitly in href=http://www.gearlive.com/index.php/news/article/interview_with_lee_loree_sleeptracker_inventor_04131225/>thisinterview, so it's not a big secret. Oh well.

It's a bit expensive ($150), but it does what it says and it does itwell. I'm glad I have mine.

Monday, April 18, 2005

I played Around the World in 80 Days several times before the Gathering and didn't play it onceat the Gathering. This wasn't because I don't like it any more; infact, I like it a great deal, but I was focused on new games a lot.

But, it's worth mentioning that there was a very interestingbi-modality of the reactions to this game. Many people seemed to havea similar reaction to me, which is that it was a fun, interestinglight strategy game. Several comments were made suggesting it wouldbe a good SdJ contendor. Others seemed to have a very negativereaction, which really surprised me. I can see someone not especiallyliking it, but I was rather surprised by the frequency and magnitudeof the negative opinions, given the similar occurence of very positiveopinions.

As usual, the Gathering was a great experience. I played many fewergames this year (about half) partially because I played longer games,but mostly because we had to spend a lot of time with Genevieve. Istill managed to play over 50 games and over 30 new-to-me games andhad a great time gaming, socializing and visiting some sights aroundColumbus.

Games

As previously mentioned, the big hit for me was Fiese Freunde FetteFeten. Other games ratings, though many of these are based on a single play:

Very good games I expect to have some longevity: FFFF, Amazonas,Heckmeck, Carcassonne: The Discovery, Diamant, Fjorde, Jambo, LouisXIV, Ticket to Ride Europe.

Games that have potential, but I didn't play enough to be sure:Dungeon Twister, Farfalia, King Arthur card game, Kreta, Manila, OltreMare, Submarine, Tower of Babel.

Not bad, but probably nothing special in the long run: AdventureLeague, Boomtown, Dancing Dice.

Not impressed: Montanara, Oriente, Walk the Dogs.

People & Sights

Genevieve was very good in general and spent some time in the hall,playing on the floor, playing on the table and socializing with andcharming everyone in sight. She didn't win any tournaments though.

Gorilla at the Columbus Zoo, expressing disappointment in Knizia's "Tower of Babel"

Genevieve Gray meets a sea turtle at the Columbus Zoo

We didn't spend all of our time gaming though, and visited theColumbus Zoo with friends at the Gathering who also brought theirkids. Genevieve enjoyed the zoo and loved the aquarium portionwith manatees and sea turtles.

21st century baby monitoring

I'm very glad we figured out the baby monitoring solution, and it substantially increased the amount ofgaming we could do. Genevieve wasn't so thrilled with the hotel roomand a couple times we had to run up to the room and comfort her backto sleep, but she did well. I suspect she just wanted to bedownstairs gaming with us.

Graeter's ice cream is very very good

We also went out to Graeter's Ice Cream which is delicious. Inparticular, their "Buckeye Blitz" is a chocolate peanut butter icecream that is among the best ice cream I have ever had. I can see whyKeith Lockhart gets it shipped in to Boston.

Fabulous Friedemann Friese

Gaming glitterati - Rick Thornquist and Greg Schloesser

Back at the event, I got to talk to a lot a lot of folks "in thebusiness". While I remain mostly uninterested in being in thebusiness of games (I like keeping my work and hobbies separate), I'malways interested to know more about it. Jay Tummelson and StefanBrueck are always interesting to talk to. And, as always, FriedemannFriese is always a real pleasure to talk to. I gushed profusely tohim about FFFF and it was interesting to get his take on some of thecards and bits from the game. It'll be interesting to me to see whichthings get changed in the US edition other than some discreetobscuring of any exposed nipples. For example, one of the cards is"Kutterpullen", or lifeboat racing, a hobby that Friedemann apparentlyhas done. It sounds like it may change to "Bowling" or "SoftballLeague" or the like.

Some board game geek

Scott Alden of boardgamegeekand I got to play a few games and talk quite a bit. With luck, someof the stuff we talked about will make it to the geek soon. Scottspent a lot of time recording GeekSpeaks at the Gathering, andeveryone should keep an ear out for them.

Lots of Heroscape on the prize table

At the prizetable, we got very lucky. Tournament winners get firstpicks, followed by everyone drawn randomly. My wife's name was secondamong the non-tournament winners. We got "Piratenbilliards", a greatdexterity game I first played at the Gathering in 2002. Then, theluck of the pick ended, and my name was picked second-to-last. Istill got Zendo. Maybe the luck handn't actually run out.

Overall, it was a great Gathering. For me, only one standout hitgame, but overall one of the best Gathering experiences I've had andthey've all been quite good.

I usually play a lot of new games at the Gathering, but this year, itwent to an even greater extreme. With two exceptions (Liar's Dice andQuack Shot), every game I played at the Gathering this year was new tome this year. In fact, with only a two more exceptions (Diamant, Walkthe Dogs), every game I played was new to me at the Gathering. Thisis a good thing, since I haven't had much other opportunity to playthe new stuff. In the 6 months leading up to Gathering 2004, I played63 new games. In the 6 months leading up to Gathering 2005, I onlyplayed 25 new games. This month alone I've played 34 new games (2pre-Gathering) which is about the same as last year, but I played manyfewer total games this year.

More new games: Farfalia is good. Dancing Dice is another good dicegame and more fun than I expected. I'll post more details and anoverall summary along with a few photos when I get home.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

More second play improvements: Australia and Carcassonne: TheDiscovery, both of which were "fair to good" on their first play havebeen bumped up in my esteem on a second play. A second play of LouisXIV also left me happier with it. English cards helps too. It's notrevolutionary, but it's quite a good game.

Jambo is very good but many people already seem to know that.Montanara, not so much. Adventure League is fun and a good middleweight Knizia game and warrants another play. I was neitherunimpressed nor excited by it.

Another game to add to the "good buzz" category is Diamant, but it'snot quite as new as some other (being all of a few weeks "old").Shadows over Camelot is also getting a lot of good comments, though itis long and there is only one copy so I haven't had a chance to playyet.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Gaming, href=http://www.mkgray.com:8000/blog/Technology/>technology and href=http://www.mkgray.com:8000/Personal/Fatherhood/>fatherhood converged in an interestingway. I am here at the Gathering, as is href=http://www.mkgray.com:8000/gray/genevieve/>Genevieve. Genevieve requires frequent napsand goes to bed before 8pm. Unfortunately, this makes getting gamingdone a little harder, as either my wife or I have to be up in the roomwhile the baby sleeps. Further, we have to be quiet and the room hasto be dark, so it's not even conducive to having some friends up tothe room to game.

We checked if the baby monitor would work, but the distance from theroom to the hall is too far. Another couple was in a similarsituation, though they had two rooms, one for them and another fortheir boys. We came up with a great solution. Their room was withinrange of our baby monitor, and naturally their two rooms wereadjacent. So, after all the children were asleep, we put thereceivers for their monitor and our monitor in their (the othercouple's) room. Then, we put our laptop next to those baby monitors.Fortunately, the hotel as free WiFi, something all hotels should have.We installed Skype on our laptop andtheirs. We then made a call with Skype from our laptop to theirs, andall the adults went down to the gaming hall with their laptop whichcould "hear" any noise coming from either room. It worked great, andall children slept peacefully and all parents had peace of mind andgot to play Louis XIV.

We used a similar set-up during Genevieve's naps during the day withmuch success, and she timed her naps well to coincide with the endingsof a game of Fiese Freunde FetteFeten and later a game of href=http://www.bgg.cc/game/12002>Jambo. The impressive thing tome is not that we did it, but that it was simple to execute with noadvanced planning. VoIP over wireless, baby monitors andinteroperability are good things.

Other than gaming at the Gathering, the Columbus Zoo is very nice andGenevieve loved the manatees. And, as always, href=http://www.graeters.com>Graeter's Ice Cream is extremelygood.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

"Heckmeck im Bratwurmeck" and Diamant win the awards for best fillersof the newer stuff. Both seem to be nearly universally enjoyed. Iwas impressed with how well Diamant does with as few as three or asmany as eight. It's a very different game with fewer, but still fun.The King Arthur card game may be a slight step up from "filler" but'sit's a nice card game that should surprise noone that it's by Knizia,very much his "feel".

I played Amazonas, Fjorde, and Tower of Babel all again. Each hasimproved with play, Amazonas perhaps the most. Amazonas has moregoing on than it seems at first and plays pretty quick anyway. Fjordetakes more like 45 minutes than the listed 30, but has two verydifferent "games" within it that mesh nicely. Tower of Babel Ienjoyed more with fewer players, but now that the gameplay is a little moreapparent, I may enjoy it with more players. Still, it was the least improved.

Fiese Freunde Fette Feten remains my favorite. I'm up to five plays,two games in a row two nights in a row. For me to play the same 90minute game back-to-back is a real rarity. In addition to anentertaining and engaging theme (if a bit more "adult" than many)which produces nice narrative, the underlying game is clever,interesting and has some real tactical depth. The auctions offer goodopportunities for tacitcal play, but the nature of the cards, themulti-faceted goals and the multiple, sometimes conflicting goals iswhat really makes the game part of this shine.

Jay says there will definitely be an English edition, though heprobably (certainly?) won't use the Rio Grande imprint. It sounds likethere will likely be some minor art changes (there is some cartoonnudity), but Jay said he'd try to keep it to a minimum. One or two ofthe life activity cards may need to be changed as well, since some ofthem aren't quite a cultural match to the US.

I'll probably play again before the Gathering is over, but I'm eagerto have it in English despite now being fairly familiar with theGerman cards.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

I played another 9 games today. The recurring theme for me seems tobe that if I had high expectations, I find myself a bit disappointedand if I wasn't expecting much, I find myself pleased. The majorexception remains Friedemann Friese's new game (co-designed withMarcel-Andre Cassasola-Merkle, which I forgot to mention yesterday>Report-2yesterday) which I expected to be good and now having played itthree times can continue to enthusiastically recommend it.

Kreta, I had no preconceived notions about other than it being StefanDorra (a plus) and Goldseiber (neutral). It's pretty good. Nothingrevolutionary, but nicely done. Australia was a bit of a surprise;it's a light, simple, fast Kramer-Kiesling game. Better thanexpected, but I didn't expect much. Louis XIV, I expected greatthings and I found it good, but probably not great. I'll play it acouple more times before I really decide. It may be great, yet.Submarine, all the reviews seemed to say it was very dry. Well, yeah,I guess, but I've played drier games. Clever mechanics that combinein interesting ways. I liked it.

As for what the "buzz" is this year, I wouldn't say it's particularlyfocused. Last year, St. Petersburg, Power Grid, Goa and Ticket toRide had a lot of play and a lot of positive buzz. The new stuff isgetting a lot of play, but not a lot of overwhelming consent on what'sgreat. Loius XIV seems to be in general impressing most peoplethough, and Heckmeck im Bratwurmeck is getting a lot of positivecomments and play as a filler. A couple of well-developed prototypesare getting a lot of positive opinions and I hope they see publishing.Everyone I've played FFFF with has enjoyed it a great deal as well.Ticket to Ride Europe has also been well received, though not gettingas much play as TTR did last year.

Monday, April 11, 2005

This evening proved more successful in terms of finding good games. Iplayed Carcassonne: The Discovery, by Leo Colovini, Fiese FreundeFette Feten, Gone Fishing, and Heckmeck im Bratwurmeck. The Discoveryis a nice distillation of the Carcassonne mechanics down to a verybasic level, with a nice variant of meeple management. Gone Fishingis a nice 2-player bluff, tactical and memory game. Heckmeck is avery nice little dice game by Knizia. Reading the rules, it doesn'tsound like much, but it works very well.

Fiese Freunde Fette Feten is great. By a good margin, it's the bestgame i've played so far. The goal of the game is to live out yourlife according to a dealt out set of "goals". These goals includethings ranging from "get married and have children" to "start a cult"to "have a heart attack", so maybe milestones or the like may be amore apt description. Through card drafting and auctioning, you havevarious life experiences like "love at first sight" or "go to biblestudy with a date" which have various effects, like startingrelationships or increasing various attributes like religion, druguse, wisdom and illness. When things line up, you can achieve yourgoals.

The game offers some very interesting choices, as often it is hard tosequence your goals, as they may be conflicting. The auctions anddrafting provide some nice player interaction, but further players canbecome "friends" or even get married and share some of the benefitsand penalties of various life experiences. Of course, that canchange. One of things Friedemann said he was trying to accomplishthis game was a game that is fun and has a amusing and entertainingquality but is a serious strategic game at the same time. It's ratherentertaining when you can lose a game (as I did) by failing to have aheart attack because I didn't smoke enough. Oh well.

The art is beautiful, as Maura's work usually is, and rather funny.There is a moderate amount of language in the game, so it's worthwaiting for an English version, especially since the theme is all thericher when the names of the cards are understandable. Jay Tummelsonof Rio Grande flippantly reassured us he would be publishing it,though Friedemann seemed to think (perhaps correctly) that there maybe some issues with some of the art in the US for being a littlegraphic.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Well, I've been here a couple days now and as always, it's great tosee people I don't get to see very often and the weather is wonderful.In terms of games, nothing has really jumped out at me so far, butthat may be because of unreasonably high hopes for a few of them.

Manila is a better betting game than most. It was better playedquickly. Amazonas was good, but I was sort of hoping for more, givenit is a "big box" from Stefan Dorra. Tower of Babel wasn't asinteresting of an experience and I hope that was partially because itwas late and it was five players. I hear it is better with fewer, andI really had high hopes for a Knizia game from Hans im Gluck. Ubongois another good entry in the "speed parallel puzzle sovling" genre.Fjorde is nice. Ticket to Ride Europe is quite good. I enjoystandard TTR, but I'm not as much a booster of it as many are. Ienjoy this new version somewhat more. The map feels "better" somehowand the rules tweaks seem improvements.

I'll try to post some more detailed comments as the week goes on.I'll even try to answer questions posted as comments.

Tuesday, April 5, 2005

There's an arithmetic game called 24. The idea is to take fourintegers and using the four basic arithmetic operations plus grouping,produce the number 24. A friend recently mentioned this game againand mentioned two of the more difficult sets: "3 3 7 7" and "1 3 4 6".They're good ones. Some simpler examples: "1 2 3 4" is solved as1*2*3*4. "3 4 5 6" is solved as (5+3-4)*6. "5 5 9 9" is solved as(5*5)-(9/9). For low integers, roughly 80% of combinations work.

Of course, if you try to solve one of those 20%, you're just going tobe frustrated. My friend wrote a program to simply spit out a yes/noanswer as to whether a given combo works. I though it was a good ideaso I wrote one too. Knowing something is solvable without knowing thesolution makes for a good puzzle.

Other ways the puzzle is played is to not limit yourself to 24, but totry to combine a set of numbers to produce 0, then 1, then 2, then 3,etc. Some sets of numbers will let you get quite high. "1 2 5 6" willproduce every integer up to 43, and 60 distinct integers. "2 5 9 10"will produce 79 of the numbers from 0 to 100 and 124 distinct valuesoverall. It's first miss is 41.

Some values are "easier" to hit than 24, which is to say an evenhigher fraction of sets can be combined to produce it. "2" is themost universal result for low numbers. All but 2 combinations ofnumbers 8 and under can be combined to equal 2. Limiting yourself tonumbers 7 and under, you can always produce 0. All of the singledigit results are more frequent than 24, as are 10, 12, 14, 15, and16.

Friday, April 1, 2005

(Like many "list" blog entries, I'm not sure this serves any purpose other than self-indulgence, sorry.)

On average, I do reasonably well at most games. I'm better at some, worse at others. There are some I'm really bad at, like Hick Hack in Gacklewack, which I've won once in 16 plays. I'm doing something wrong, but at least I have that one win. There is, however, a limited list of games that I have never won, not even a single game. Obviously, there's a bunch of games I've played only once or twice and haven't won, but I'm not counting those. Without further ado, games (I've played 5+ times) that I've never won:

Coloretto (0/12)

Arbos (0/8)

Metro (0/7)

Wyatt Earp (0/7)

Zum Kuckuck (0/7)

Das Amulett (0/6)

Drahseilakt (0/6)

Power Grid (0/6)

I don't see any big unifying theme. A couple of them are games Icontinue to enjoy very much: Power Grid and Zum Kuckuck. A couple aregames that my poor performance has certainly taken the shine off of:Coloretto and Metro. I've never especially liked Wyatt Earp, but Ifeel that way about many rummy games, but others like it so much I'vebeen convinced to play it a bunch. My hands are shaky, so Arbos is nosurprise; it's more of a surprise that no other dexterity games arepresent. Das Amulett and Drahtseilakt I also still like. Of all ofthem, I'd really like to win a game of Power Grid.

Personal

Professional

I am a Engineering Director at Google. My team and I work on Search.

Previously, I was the CTO at an 802.11 location and security company, Newbury Networks in Boston. In June, 1999 I received my Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. I graduated from MIT (undergraduate) in June, 1997, in physics. Prior to that I was CTO of net.Genesis from 1994 to 1996.